This thread is for anyone who wants to mod their Xbox 360 by flashing its DVD drive with hacked firmware, or anyone who has already had this done but wants to keep up to date with the releases of hacked firmware to take advantage of new features as they develop and minimise the chances of being banned from Xbox Live.

Update 7/3/09 – iXtreme firmware version 1.51 has been released for all drives (so the wait is over for those with Hitachi drives who didn’t get v1.5!). The new version includes support for the newer Xbox 360 games which have extra sectors at the beginning of the disk that contain the NXE update. These games can be patched to work on older versions of iXtreme firmware, but you’re better off using unpatched backups with the latest firmware to boot them, so update if you can!

Update 24/3/09 – Updated with JungleFlasher v0.1.55 Beta and abgX360 v1.0.1

Update – 11/5/09 – Updated with JungleFlasher v0.1.59 Beta

Update – 15/5/09 – Updated with iXtreme 1.6 for Samsung, Benq and Liteon drives. Hitachi to follow at a later (unspecified) date.

Latest tools for flashing have also been provided. As always, read the tutorials and instructions before doing anything, even if you’ve flashed before, just in case anything has changed.

First of all, general tutorials on flashing – what you need, how to do it, etc. If you’re new to this, read these thoroughly before you do anything else.

Introductory Tutorials (Please note – given the changes and new software available with iXtreme 1.5, these original tutorials may now be out of date. However I am leaving the link posted here for reference because the information may still be useful as the general principles still apply and it’s still relevant for flashing older firmware or working with older drives.)

http://rapidshare.com/files/143963374/Firmware_Flashing_Tutorials.rar

Flashing LiteOn drives using VIA SATA chipsets tutorial

http://rapidshare.com/files/176547777/LiteonVIA.rar

JungleFlasher User Guide
A tutorial for flashing any kind of Xbox 360 DVD drive using JungleFlasher. Not the simplest or easiest way for some drives (DOS is better for Samsung and Benq), but essential for Liteon drives.

http://rapidshare.com/files/214990388/JungleFlasherGuide.rar

Without further ado – the firmware files themselves:

iXtreme 1.6 for Samsung, Benq and Liteon drives:

http://rapidshare.com/files/233372861/iXtreme1.6.rar

iXtreme 1.51 for ALL drives:

http://rapidshare.com/files/206455590/iXtreme_xbox360_1.51_all_drives.rar

And the tools needed to flash your drive:

JungleFlasher v0.1.59 Beta (a much improved version of this new tool, which does pretty much everything for you!)

http://rapidshare.com/files/231692077/jungleflasher.0.1.59.beta.rar

Firmware Toolbox 4.8 (For flashing Hitachi drives in Windows. Also does general management and reading of firmware files, including spoofing and key changing.)

http://rapidshare.com/files/206455902/360FW-Toolbox-v4.8.rar

iPrep v008.8 (for Samsung, BenQ and Liteon drives, used to prepare boot disks according to your SATA chipset)

http://rapidshare.com/files/180894315/iPrep_v008.8.rar

And iXtreme 1.5 definition files for iPrep (so that it recognises the iXtreme firmware as valid)

http://rapidshare.com/files/176544607/ixDef1.5.rar

Boot disk files for flashing Samsung and BenQ drives (Custom made by myself, a slight variation on the files created by iPrep so you can just use this instead of iPrep. Copy the files to a bootable USB drive to read firmware, copy key to new firmware and flash new firmware, and keep backups of everything along the way!)

http://rapidshare.com/files/143964036/USB_Boot_Disk__Samsung_Benq_.rar

Slax Boot Disk 2.1 (For flashing Hitachi drives. Used to get the drives into ModeB so they can be detected by Windows)

http://rapidshare.com/files/143970533/Slax_Hitachi_Boot_Disk_2.1.rar

79 Unlock (for Hitachi 79 drives)
Getting a Hitachi 79 drive into ModeB isn’t enough – you still won’t be able to read the firmware until you unlock the drive. You used to need to install a modchip for this, but now there’s a software solution.

http://rapidshare.com/files/143964505/79_Unlock.rar

FirmTool v1.3

http://rapidshare.com/files/176547840/FirmTool_1.3_FINAL.rar

DOS Flash v1.7

http://rapidshare.com/files/176548169/DosFlash1.7.rar

DVDKey32 v0.7

http://rapidshare.com/files/176548178/DVDKey32_v0.7.rar

And some other useful programs -

abgx360 v1.0.1 (A newer tool for ensuring that ISO files are stealth patched and iXtreme compatible, and patching them if they aren’t)

http://rapidshare.com/files/214989371/abgx360v1.0.1.rar

XDVDMulleter Beta 10.2 (For ensuring that ISO files are properly stealth patched and iXtreme compatible. Also for adding security sectors to stealth patch ISO files and creating .dvd files to set the correct layer break sector.)

http://rapidshare.com/files/143964479/XDVDMulleterBeta10.2.rar